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From PC Magazine - June issue

It's getting that there are as many articles on Cellphone than PC's

So Long Desktop, Hello iPlJone
My generation's concept of what it means to compute is so quaint and firmly rooted in the 20th century. Young people and teens using computers 10 or 20 years from now will look back and laugh at people like me-and their own parents and grandpar­ents-who sat down at desks and did their work using 20-pound boxes.
The decline of the deskbound PC has been under way for years, but recent events convince me that the transition to desktopless computing is accelerating at a breakneck pace. And mainstream laptops could someday meet the same fate.
What precipitated these changes? The arrival of the Apple iPhone, of course. It's an okay phone and an excellent multime­dia device. But now, with the promise the Apple software development kit (SDK) holds and the introduction of the Exchange ActiveSync software, the iPhone is about to become much, much more.
I know I railed against the iPhone's lack of physical keys and nearly impossible-to­use virtual keyboard. My shortsighted eval­uation, however, failed to take into account that Apple could care less whether I can use the keyboard. Its target market (young, hip 20-somethings) adopted the iPhone immediately and figured out how best to use the virtual keyboard to message, text, and search in the Safari browser. So what if I ct)uldn't figure it out?
The addition of business-class tools, such as synchronized e-mail and contacts, and the potential for a whole new world of applications will transform this prod- • uct from a really smart phone to a pocket­size Pc. Sure, countless smartphones and ultraportable laptops (and even midsize UMPCs) are out there, but the iPhone is special.
One of the reasons Apple's iPhone stands to be a game changer is that people lust after it. Young people buy it because it's a passport to coolness, acceptance, and good times among their friends. Business­people who like to appear hip want it, too,
but many have held off. Without synchro­nized e-mail, they'd still have to carry their BlackBerrys. The BlackBerry Pearl is sexy, but it doesn't have the iPhone's cachet.
Psychographics aside, the iPhone is the most important product of the still-young 21st century. Excellent interface software and hardware innovations, including the multitouch screen and internal acceler­ometer, present possibilities for comput­ing experiences that no deskbound PC can match. Laptops, even ultraportables, will pale in comparison.
network. All business documents will live in the central server, and you'll carry just a subset on your iPhone. You will be able to pull down a file whenever you need it via Wi-Fi (through a VPN, of course) or over the high-speed cell network.
The iPhone's size and motion capabili­ties lend themselves to consumer and busi­ness applications we never imagined. How about an application that stores notes with a shake or acts like an Etch A Sketch, erasing scribbles with a jiggle of the phone? What if you could pass notes between iPhones by
The iFhone is the most important product of the
still-young 21st century holds possibilities that
no deskbound PC can match. Laptops, even ultra­portables, will pale in comparison.
Some people will always want the raw horsepower of a desktop PC. Photo edi­tors, videographers, musicians, and those working on very complex documents will, at the very least, need the power of a mainstream desktop. And PC garners will demand the power of a desktop or super­charged laptop. These niches will still exist, but the vast majority of consumers and businesspeople only need to handle e-mails, browse the Web, instant-message, make phone calls, do word processing, and manage videos and photos. If they can get all of this from something that fits into their pocket, then why have a PC at all?
That said, there will be the occasional need for bigger screens and faster input than you can get from the iPhone. So expect to see a new class of iPhone docks that provide access to a full-size QWERTY keyboard and the widescreen display of your choice. The dock will also connect the iPhone to gigabytes of storage that could be local or a NAS in your home or on the office
shaking them in the direction of a recipient, or play "catch" by gently tossing a virtual ball from one iPhone screen to another? Or imagine adding effects to video simply by making the motion you want the moving image to make. Instant messaging will take on a new flavor as you tickle the screen to create a smile on the other end of the con­versation or give the phone a hard shake to send an angry face to your chatting com­panion. You'll push slides in presentations by shaking the phone left or right, play Concentration by rocking the phone back and forth, and store ten on-screen files in one folder by tilting the phone and''pour­ing" them all in.
The possibilities are endless~as they should be for whatever succeeds desktop computing.
TALK TO THE CHIEF You can contact Lance at Lance_ [e-mail]. For more of his columns, go to go.pcmag .com/ulanoff.